Predicting Entertainment Trends

The convergence of multimodal entertainment into one big swarm of the same entertainment fed in different modes is the best help to accurately to predicting further trends in entertainment in general will evolve. Let me explain.

“Multimodal” here means all forms of entertainment which used to be distinct: Cinema, TV, Radio, Written word etc.

Even just casually watching events in entertainment unfold, one would probably notice the trend in past years of great TV actors trying to make it onto movies and rarely ever any movie actors trying to make the opposite jump. In this particular case, the reasons were clear; Movies were a one time deal that put everything into the initial launch, which means more investment into acting talent. This was when the two forms were distinct - different directors, different actors, different budgets. With new forms of monetizing TV content, new technology taking over the distribution for both art forms (Streaming platforms), and the insane rise of The Franchise - who wants one great movie or one great TV show when you can have the Marvel Cinematic Universe which includes both. So now there’s way little distinction between the two: Movies are made to franchise into other forms, TV episodes are made to be binged on Netflix effectively making them closer to movies than ever, and both have more money invested in them every year.

The same is seen every other forms of entertainment, even the newer ones. YouTube videos with higher budgets are made every new month. Musicians with an audience on YouTube don’t try and move to more traditional ways anymore, instead the more mainstream traditional musicians wish to be on YouTube too.

The idea is to use this to be able to predicts trends in entertainment.

Let’s say a previously unexplored kind of movie is does really well. It is no longer the same kind will become really popular only in the movie space. The same thing will be made into TV shows and video games almost instantly. Predicting these more-closely related fields is not as big a deal. But with the rise of Content and forms of entertainment no longer being as distinct, you’d be good to assume the same movie genre being replicated into less-obvious forms. Think podcasts, think livestreams, think Twitter posts, or Non-fiction books, or Televised News reports (Yes, it’s entertainment). It is no longer the case that you would have to worry about “How can this thing be done in this extremely different form of entertainment?”. Leave it to the career content-writers, the under pressure CEOs, the money-hungry executives pushing artists to make money off of others’ success, or maybe just the inspired artists.

For this to mean something in context of predicting trends, we need one thing established: it takes time even to copy something (for now at least). When a new popular movie about the nuclear bomb comes out, you know fear of nuclear war will increase right with televised news focusing more on nuclear war-related topics. Imagine you could directly invest in podcasts, would it be so unreasonable to invest in any podcast related to modern history’s disaster scares? Or say a Twitch streamers who talks government policies (Oh yes, those exist)?